The next morning it was all over Wilna that Vladimir had surrendered himself, and that a telegram had been received from St. Petersburg ordering Count Loris to be set at liberty, but to remain in the city on a sort of honorable parole until the trial of the prisoners came off. A crowd of his friends and well-wishers, and the multitude of idlers whom such occasions always collect, assembled at the prison-gates in the early afternoon to see him brought forth. My friend the village priest and myself stood next the gate. "There are the two who so cruelly tormented Count Kourásoff during his captivity," began to be whispered around. Taunts and epithets were freely bestowed upon us, which soon changed to open-mouthed wonder; for when the great gates clanged wide open, and Count Loris with uncovered head walked forward, we were the first he saluted and embraced. Vladimir escaped with a sentence of only seven years' exile, which, through his own good conduct and his brother's influence, was considerably shortened. Sometimes when I behold the happiness of the Count and Countess Kourásoff, I say to myself with a sigh. "This ideal life might have been mine with my adored Maria!" A VIRGINIA COLONEL. The colonel was a regular old-time Virginia colonel, and still stuck manfully to his blue coat and brass buttons and his buff nankeen waistcoat, in which quaint costume his clean, handsome, ruddy old face never looked handsomer. "Buff and blue is the costume for gentlemen to wear," the colonel would roar; and whatever he said, Yellow Bob echoed like a Greek chorus. "Yes, siree; dat sut'ny is so. _I_ got a blue coat ole marse done gimme." The colonel's clinging to old days and old ways was pathetic. Although he swore forty times a day that the war had ruined him, it had not. There was enough left for the colonel and madam and the colony of their old servants, which, as the case frequently is to this day in Virginia, had settled around them. The colonel still had Yellow Bob to swear at, and Mrs. Randolph had Patsy to carry the keys and make mango pickle and peach cordial. But the age had swept them high and dry. They talked about things chiefly that happened in the 'fifties, and when they got into the 'sixties the colonel was apt to damn the Yankees so profusely that Mrs. Randolph was fain to ask him if he remembered the trip they took to the Springs in 'forty-nine, when his pocket was picked of nine hundred and eighty dollars; at which the colonel and Yellow Bob would exchange winks. Yellow Bob knew that a race between Colonel Doswell's strawberry roan and Major Beverly's Sir Archy had more to do with the loss of that nine hundred and eighty dollars than Mrs. Randolph--good, simple soul--suspected. As for the colonel, the war did not make so much difference to him as he fancied. He now spent the best part of his life sitting on the broad front porch at Drum Point, with a julep handy and Yellow Bob within